Thanks for the feedback! You're probably right about the skirt. I'll think about that!
Someone over on CA pointed out that I'm falling back into my old stupid habits of amping up blacks and whites to the extreme, so I went ahead and toned down the environment to introduce some more bounce light. Hopefully it's on the right track.
Her breasts seem more lopsided than they may actually supposed to be, in some poses, or you maybe unconsciously straitening her shoulders, not sure. (Or maybe the model has a lower right breast, but probably not as useful to emphasize it in a general anstomy study)
Yeah I think I was just failing to emphasize when a shoulder was lifted, thus lifting the breast. Good call, thanks!
Doing some back anatomy studies this afternoon cuz I dunno what's going on back there most of the time. The line drawing is from Michael Hampton as a refresher, then I went and did the purple study from a black and white photo reference.
I got a nice wooden board from the art supplies store, and managed to strap my Surface Pro 3 to it with a big thick rubber band around the bottom bezel, which lets me prop the device up in a more ergonomic position at life drawing. It is SO much more comfortable than hunching over my tablet while I try to balance it on one knee. Anyway, here are some gestures from figure drawing last night, 10 mins at the top, 5 mins for most of them in the middle, 2 mins for the simpler ones at the bottom.
I really like your gesture drawings, but I feel like these painted figures lack some understructure. This lasts figures legs look a little goopy.
I think the playing with texture you did above is interesting, but I still think some actual material studies would do you some good. If you forced yourself to tighten your stroke and render things differently, it should give you a much wider range.
Thanks for the feedback Irkuka. My excuse is that the long pose figure group I go to doesn't offer any warm up time, and I rarely have time to warm up at home before going to life drawing in the evening, so I end up struggling to crank out a decent drawing right off the bat. I should honestly just spend the first 20 minutes of the sessions scribbling out some gesture studies of the pose, I think I'd end up with a much more solid drawing.
Thanks for the encouragement to try some material studies... I am gonna get to work on that this week for sure!
This one for sure feels more solid. Forms on the right foot feel a bit rough. You are still really zoning in on that face, which is not always a bad thing in a drawing, but if you are trying to get some general anatomy practice out of the class, I encourage you to force yourself to spend less of your time there. You are for sure comfortable with the face area, but these drawings arent really for show. Spend your time fighting and figuring out the parts that you find difficult.
I would also think about some isolated hand and feet studies.
Ok dude, here's a strong suggestion. At your next figure drawing session, take the whole time to do a very clean line drawing. Instead of getting distracted by the values and shadows and whatnot, just focus on making it the best constructed, best proportioned, most nicely observed contour drawing you can possibly do in those 2 hours. Make sure your muscles and forms feel like they connect together properly and solidly, and avoid being too vague. Make the study as clear as possible. These Bargue drawings are kind of what I mean, but hopefully you'd have time to move a little bit further, since these are still at a somewhat generalized/simplified stage.
Even if it's just a one-session break from the digital painting stuff, I think it would really help you see what you're capable of and maybe falling short on when you are hurrying with a painting study.
Ooookay, had kind of a crazy couple of months there with a lot of traveling for work and other distractions. Here's a bunch of stuff that I managed to squeeze in. Oh and BTW Lyrium, thank you for that idea about doing some focused contour studies at figure drawing, I'm going to work on that at life drawing tonight!
I think that armor study is a good example of where your brush strokes are letting you down. There's a sort of weakness in edge control you have, and I think your short choppy strokes sometimes get in the way of you seeing the larger pattern of light. You might want to force yourself to pull up on that for a bit, because a more cohesive look to your shadows could make a lot of these images way stronger
Thanks as always for the insight, Iruka. Here's something I've been working on for a little bit, making some honest effort at cutting out the chunky, choppy brush strokes everywhere. This definitely needs some more polish before I call it done (especially with the tree up front). I don't think the perspective of the basket handle looks correct, either. Hm.
It's supposed to be a repaint of this basic idea from 2.5 years ago, a little way to measure my progress I guess...
And here are some figures from life drawing last night, first two are 10 minutes, last one is 15 minutes. Haven't been able to get out to long pose lately, unfortunately.
Gonna start updating again... here's a couple of recent things!
I set up my very first mockup in Blender to light the character/pillar on that last one and, well... shit. Why have I been avoiding 3D for so long? It made everything so much easier and I think I'm gonna learn a lot by lighting things in Blender instead of just kinda making shit up.
Also, here's some recent figure sketches of various lengths (5-15 mins mostly) , done from life. Using a sketchier brush lately to sort of emulate pencil drawing and really enjoying it.
Thanks for the feedback... yeah a jump over the tail was definitely the idea. I see what you mean though, it does look odd. I'll revisit the pose and see what I can do!
To co-opt an animation term, you should avoid too much twinning in your poses - that is having both limbs perform a symmetrical motion. The legs on the character to the left and the arms on the character to the right of the canvas are both very symmetrical, which makes them feel too stable, when what you want is more dynamic motion.
There also isn't a clear focal point at the moment. I know it's only a rough sketch but there a few easy ways to fix this. First is to make sure that the highest contrast is in the dragon's mouth, and decrease the contrast elsewhere. There's also a lot of wasted space towards the edge of the canvas, particularly on the left, which should be cropped out to focus on the action. You might also want to try a dutch tilt, which would both lead the eye towards the dragon's head and create more diagonals, which would make the scene feel more dynamic. Also consider having shadows cast by objects outside of the scene, like on the dragon's tail. This both makes the scene feel like it's part of a broader landscape, and can be a tool to help you decrease the contrast in areas that are less important.
The dragon is waaaaay too saturated at the moment. The highest saturation will always be in the midtones, while shadows and highlights are proportionally less saturated. The reflected light coming off the ground is orange, meaning that the underside of the dragon should be significantly warmer than it is. Also don't forget that the wing in the foreground would have some subsurface scattering, and wouldn't be nearly that dark.
Here's a 30 second mockup illustrating a lot of the things I mentioned. It's really rough so don't there are still a tonne of ways that you could improve it. See how the eye now follows from the figure in the top left, down the curve of the dragon's wing to it's head.
Ahh, thank you Flay! To be honest, some of those things (like the color/saturation of the dragon) are just placeholders while I work out the drawing and basic block lighting for the characters. But most of that critique is really helpful! I'm especially intrigued by the tilting of the scene, which is something that I've been really shy about trying in the past for some reason.
As it happens, I was just about to post this update where I reworked a lot of the composition. In lieu of the jumping character, I decided to try to play up the acrobat angle with a person vaulting backward over the tail. Though now I'm kinda worried that it just looks like they're being smacked by the tail and flailing around, haha. Any thoughts on that? Maybe once you can see the character's determined facial expression it'll be more clear, HA. Hopefully the character's shadow on the tail can kind of communicate their position and show they're easily clearing it? Also the scale of the character's might be a bit wonky relative to one another, I'll toy with that.
It definitely reads to me like they're getting smacked with the tail-- I would think the legs would need to be more dynamic if they're vaulting from flat ground-- knees up further and probably not extended the same way...
So I struggled with that composition a lot and really could not figure out a way to make it clear that the left figure isn't getting smacked by the tail. No matter what I did it looked kind of ambiguous. So I went back to the drawing board a THIRD time. Here's what I'm working on now.
Looking again, I think the previous image is more dynamic and exciting... the angle was lower and the tail helped the flow of the image. This one looks kinda static. Oh well, at least I think the colors and values are coming along pretty well!
previous version of the dragon thing is definitely more interesting, her jumping inbetween its tail is way more spatially dynamic, plus right now it looks like the dragon is looking into the distance and isn't trying to hit the dude.
If anything I think the problem with the girl lies in her pose, it's very stiff and constructed, without much movement. When you sketch and even when you paint, always try to go around the form when trying to make a dynamic pose. If you want that pose to look like she's dodging, try to twist her body more fluidly (if that makes sense, as if her entire body is one mass of clay being twisted), it looks more like a ragdoll at the moment. Also, her arms should probably be aiming at the ground, preparing for her to land again.
Something like this could work better, since she looks much more dynamic and in control. The stiffer it gets the more she looks like an action figure being flung away by the tail of a cat.
her new pose also plays more with the spatial composition between the bodies, since her body's axis is no longer perpendicular to that of the tail. Also, fixed the dragon head, it should be completely in profile if it is to work, I think that would also work nicely to have something flat closing off that space behind the dude.
in general I would say practice drawing around the form. Screw constructing characters for a while, just draw them by starting at one point and then going around and around. No construction, we've gotta get your head into thinking more 3dimensionally. It's best to practice this with life drawing, so if there's a place nearby definitely go there.
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that it looked a lot more dynamic when the character was leaping over the raised tail, but no matter what I tried I just could not get the image to read as her clearing the tail instead of getting smacked by it. It always seemed ambiguous. You're definitely right that the current pose is too static and flat and doesn't make much sense for a number of reasons. I like the direction you went with it. Thanks again, I REALLY appreciate you taking the time! I'm gonna take a break from the piece for a week or two and then see what I can do.
In the meantime, here's a little lighting comp idea...
Getting there on this one. Don't know that I really like the image much the more I look at it, but I think I made some good breakthroughs in terms of my process for lighting a scene. Excited to start my next one.
The action pose girl's arms feel a little spindly to me, but I think moving on is the right call. Overall I think the lighting set up worked really well. You also tightened up your strokes which is great, it's much easier to take in the different surfaces in your recent work.
So I noticed that I'm always impatient at the beginning of starting a new piece and just want to dive into the painting. Wit this one I'm trying to spend a lot more time setting up this composition and designing the characters. Gonna work on the lineart for a while longer before moving on.
The extra time spent on the composition paid off; it feels much more exciting than the last couple. The tilt might be a little severe though, just because pushing it that direction kind of takes away from the effect of him craning to look up at her and the tension/danger conveyed by that position. Also in the lighting pass, be careful again to keep that bounce light under control.
Posts
Someone over on CA pointed out that I'm falling back into my old stupid habits of amping up blacks and whites to the extreme, so I went ahead and toned down the environment to introduce some more bounce light. Hopefully it's on the right track.
Got bored of this one, bad reference choice on my part...
Would have finished this but I lost the reference and can't remember where I found it, oh well.
Doing some back anatomy studies this afternoon cuz I dunno what's going on back there most of the time. The line drawing is from Michael Hampton as a refresher, then I went and did the purple study from a black and white photo reference.
And the same study with some characters that I cut out of another painting and poorly shoehorned in...
And some various stuff from life drawing.
I think the playing with texture you did above is interesting, but I still think some actual material studies would do you some good. If you forced yourself to tighten your stroke and render things differently, it should give you a much wider range.
Thanks for the encouragement to try some material studies... I am gonna get to work on that this week for sure!
I would also think about some isolated hand and feet studies.
Even if it's just a one-session break from the digital painting stuff, I think it would really help you see what you're capable of and maybe falling short on when you are hurrying with a painting study.
facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt
Character portraits I made for my D&D group:
Couple of other D&D related things:
Jessica Jones fanart
Some stuff from figure drawing this past week:
Couple of other little studies
It's supposed to be a repaint of this basic idea from 2.5 years ago, a little way to measure my progress I guess...
And here are some figures from life drawing last night, first two are 10 minutes, last one is 15 minutes. Haven't been able to get out to long pose lately, unfortunately.
I set up my very first mockup in Blender to light the character/pillar on that last one and, well... shit. Why have I been avoiding 3D for so long? It made everything so much easier and I think I'm gonna learn a lot by lighting things in Blender instead of just kinda making shit up.
Okay some points on that last image:
To co-opt an animation term, you should avoid too much twinning in your poses - that is having both limbs perform a symmetrical motion. The legs on the character to the left and the arms on the character to the right of the canvas are both very symmetrical, which makes them feel too stable, when what you want is more dynamic motion.
There also isn't a clear focal point at the moment. I know it's only a rough sketch but there a few easy ways to fix this. First is to make sure that the highest contrast is in the dragon's mouth, and decrease the contrast elsewhere. There's also a lot of wasted space towards the edge of the canvas, particularly on the left, which should be cropped out to focus on the action. You might also want to try a dutch tilt, which would both lead the eye towards the dragon's head and create more diagonals, which would make the scene feel more dynamic. Also consider having shadows cast by objects outside of the scene, like on the dragon's tail. This both makes the scene feel like it's part of a broader landscape, and can be a tool to help you decrease the contrast in areas that are less important.
The dragon is waaaaay too saturated at the moment. The highest saturation will always be in the midtones, while shadows and highlights are proportionally less saturated. The reflected light coming off the ground is orange, meaning that the underside of the dragon should be significantly warmer than it is. Also don't forget that the wing in the foreground would have some subsurface scattering, and wouldn't be nearly that dark.
Here's a 30 second mockup illustrating a lot of the things I mentioned. It's really rough so don't there are still a tonne of ways that you could improve it. See how the eye now follows from the figure in the top left, down the curve of the dragon's wing to it's head.
As it happens, I was just about to post this update where I reworked a lot of the composition. In lieu of the jumping character, I decided to try to play up the acrobat angle with a person vaulting backward over the tail. Though now I'm kinda worried that it just looks like they're being smacked by the tail and flailing around, haha. Any thoughts on that? Maybe once you can see the character's determined facial expression it'll be more clear, HA. Hopefully the character's shadow on the tail can kind of communicate their position and show they're easily clearing it? Also the scale of the character's might be a bit wonky relative to one another, I'll toy with that.
And here's a quick crop/tilt experiment...
Uncanny Magazine!
The Mad Writers Union
Looking again, I think the previous image is more dynamic and exciting... the angle was lower and the tail helped the flow of the image. This one looks kinda static. Oh well, at least I think the colors and values are coming along pretty well!
If anything I think the problem with the girl lies in her pose, it's very stiff and constructed, without much movement. When you sketch and even when you paint, always try to go around the form when trying to make a dynamic pose. If you want that pose to look like she's dodging, try to twist her body more fluidly (if that makes sense, as if her entire body is one mass of clay being twisted), it looks more like a ragdoll at the moment. Also, her arms should probably be aiming at the ground, preparing for her to land again.
Something like this could work better, since she looks much more dynamic and in control. The stiffer it gets the more she looks like an action figure being flung away by the tail of a cat.
her new pose also plays more with the spatial composition between the bodies, since her body's axis is no longer perpendicular to that of the tail. Also, fixed the dragon head, it should be completely in profile if it is to work, I think that would also work nicely to have something flat closing off that space behind the dude.
in general I would say practice drawing around the form. Screw constructing characters for a while, just draw them by starting at one point and then going around and around. No construction, we've gotta get your head into thinking more 3dimensionally. It's best to practice this with life drawing, so if there's a place nearby definitely go there.
In the meantime, here's a little lighting comp idea...
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facebook.com/LauraCatherwoodArt